And I am also glad the Crag is partly responsible for starting, or at
least unconsciously aiding, this scheme in high finance of mine; and he
is also in reality the silent sponsor for this unhatched revolution. I
am deeply contented to go to sleep with that comforting; thought tucked
under my pillow.

CHAPTER VIII

AN ATTAINED TO-MORROW

I've changed my mind about a woman's being like a whirlwind. The women
of now are the attained to-morrow that the world since the beginning has
been trying to catch up with. Jane is that, and then the day after, too,
and what she has done to Glendale in these two weeks has stunned the old
town into a trance of delight and amazement. She has recreated us,
breathed the breath of modernity into us, and started the machine up the
grade of civilization at a pace that makes me hold my breath for fear of
something jolting us.

She and Aunt Augusta have organized an Equality League, and that wheel
came very near flying loose and being the finish of Uncle Peter.

He came to see me the morning of the first meeting and, when I saw him
coming up the front walk, I got an astral vision of the chips on his
shoulder enlarged to twice their natural size, and called to Jasper to
mix the juleps very long and extra deep. But deep as they were, to the
very top of the longest glasses, he couldn't drown his wrath in his.

"Women, women," he exploded from over the very mint sprig itself, "all
fools, all fools from the beginning of time; made that way on
purpose--on purpose--hey? World needs some sort of creature with no
better sense than to want to spend their lives fooling with babies and
the bread of life. Human young and religion are the only things in the
world men can't attend to for themselves and that's what they need women
for. Women with no brains--but all heart--all heart--hey?"

"Why should just a little brain hurt their heart-action. Uncle Peter?" I
asked mildly. There is nothing in the world that I ever met that I enjoy
any more than one of Uncle Peter's rages, and I always try to be meekly
inflammatory.

"They're never satisfied with using them to run church societies and
children's internal organs, but they want to use 'em on men and
civilization in general. Where'd you get that Yankee school-marm--hey?
Why don't she get a husband and a baby and settle down? Ten babies,
twenty babies if necessary--hey?"

"You are entirely mistaken as to the plans that Jane and Aunt Augusta